Chapter 2: Eight Months of Becoming

Anastasia’s POV:

“You have paint on your face.”

I looked up from the mood board spread across my desk and found Celeste Dupont standing in my office doorway in a cream blazer and reading glasses pushed up on her head, looking at me the way she looked at everything, like she had already figured it out and was simply waiting for it to catch up to itself.

“I was testing fabric swatches,” I said, reaching up to touch my cheek.

“With your face?”

“It was an accident.”

“Most revelations are.” She walked in without being invited because Celeste Dupont did not wait to be invited into anything, set a coffee on the edge of my desk, and looked at the mood board with the particular attention she gave things she was deciding whether to respect. “The Harmon project?”

“The Henderson account is what I was told.”

“The Harmon project,” she repeated, like I had not spoken, and tapped one corner of the board where I had pinned a swatch of deep emerald velvet beside a pencil sketch of an open plan living space. “This is good, Anastasia. This is actually very good.”

Coming from Celeste, that was the equivalent of anyone else dropping to their knees and weeping with admiration. I had learned that in the three months I had been working here. Celeste communicated in understatements and silences and the occasional raised eyebrow that contained entire paragraphs.

“Thank you,” I said.

She picked up her coffee, looked at me over the rim of it, and said nothing for a moment in the specific way she had that always made me feel like she was reading something written on the inside of my forehead.

“You look tired,” she said finally.

“I am fine.”

“I did not ask if you were fine. I said you look tired. Those are two different observations and only one of them is true.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again because she was right and arguing with Celeste when she was right was an experience I had already learned to avoid. Eight months since I walked out of that penthouse and I still woke up some mornings reaching for a life I had deliberately left behind. Not Lucas specifically. Not the marriage. But the version of myself that had believed so completely in something that turned out to be built on sand. Grieving that was a different animal entirely and it visited on its own schedule without asking permission.

“I had a bad night,” I said.

“They get further apart,” she said simply, and walked back toward the door. “Finish the Harmon project. I need it on my desk by Thursday and I need it to be the best work this firm has produced this quarter.”

“It will be.”

She paused in the doorway with her back to me.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I gave it to you.”

She was gone before I could respond, her heels already clicking down the corridor toward the next thing that needed her attention, and I sat in the quiet she left behind and felt something warm move through my chest that took me a moment to identify.

I felt useful. Genuinely, specifically useful in a way that had nothing to do with anyone else’s comfort or schedule or needs. It was such an unfamiliar sensation that the first few times it surfaced in those early weeks I had not recognized it at all.

Eight months.

Eight months since the elevator doors opened onto that lobby and I walked out into cold air with two suitcases and a phone buzzing with Renata’s message and absolutely no plan beyond the understanding that staying was no longer something I was capable of. I had called Simone from the street outside the building and she had arrived in eleven minutes with her car running and a look on her face that said she had been waiting for this call for longer than I had been ready to make it.

She had not said I told you so. That was how I knew she loved me.

She had put my suitcases in her trunk and driven me to her apartment and made tea neither of us drank and sat with me on her couch while I stared at the wall and processed the particular silence of a woman who has just made the biggest decision of her life and is not yet sure if she is brave or simply broken.

“Both,” Simone had said, reading my face the way she always could. “You can be both.”

The job at Celeste’s firm had come three weeks later through a connection Simone had refused to explain in detail. I had walked into the interview in a blazer I had bought the day before with money from the account Lucas did not know I had been quietly maintaining since year two of our marriage, not out of suspicion but out of the instinct of a woman who had learned early that having something that was entirely yours was never something to apologize for. Celeste had looked at my portfolio for four minutes without speaking and then told me I started Monday.

I had cried in my car for twenty minutes afterward.

Not from sadness. From the specific overwhelming relief of being seen for something that had nothing to do with whose wife I was.

That was three months ago. Now I had my own office with a window that looked out over Harlow City’s midtown skyline and a desk covered in fabric swatches and sketches and coffee cups and all the beautiful evidence of a mind that was finally being used the way it was always supposed to be used. I had a small apartment twenty minutes from the office that I had furnished slowly and deliberately, one piece at a time, every choice entirely mine. I had Simone three blocks away and Celeste down the hall and a version of my days that belonged to me in a way nothing had in six years.

I was not healed. I was not whole. But I was building and that was more than enough.

My phone buzzed on the desk.

Simone.

“Dean Mercer just called me. Why is Dean Mercer calling me, Ana. Why does he have my number. I did not give him my number.”

I smiled at my phone for the first time all day.

“He probably got it from Lucas,” I typed back.

Three dots appeared and disappeared three times before her response came through.

“Lucas gave him my number? Lucas who has not left his penthouse according to Dean who called me for eleven minutes this morning about his best friend’s emotional state? That Lucas?”

I set my phone face down on the desk because that particular conversation was going to require more bandwidth than I currently had available and I had a mood board to finish and a life to keep building and absolutely no room in either for the sound of Lucas Salvatore’s name landing in my chest the way it just did.

Like something that had not moved but had simply been waiting.

My office phone rang.

I picked it up without thinking.

“Anastasia Voss.”

A pause. Then a voice I did not recognize, male, professional, with an undertone of something careful.

“Ms. Voss. This is James Holt from Holt and Associates. I am calling on behalf of a client who has specifically requested your firm for a major commercial project. The budget is significant and the timeline is immediate. I was told you are the lead designer on the Celeste Dupont team.”

“That is correct,” I said, sitting up straighter without meaning to.

“Wonderful. My client would like to arrange a preliminary meeting as soon as possible. He has reviewed the firm’s portfolio and he is particularly interested in your work specifically.”

Something about the way he said that made the back of my neck prickle.

“May I ask who your client is?” I said.

Another pause. Shorter this time but deliberate in a way that told me the pause was intentional.

“Lucas Salvatore,” he said. “Of Salvatore Enterprises.”

The room did not spin. My hands did not shake. I sat at my desk in the office I had built for myself in the life I had stitched together from nothing and I breathed through the seventeen different things that tried to happen inside my chest simultaneously.

Then I picked up my pen.

“Tell Mr. Salvatore,” I said, in a voice that did not waver once, “that we will have availability next Thursday.”

I hung up before James Holt could respond.

Then I sat very still for a long moment and looked at the mood board on my desk and the emerald velvet swatch and the pencil sketch of the open plan living space and I thought about the woman who had stood in a penthouse bathroom eight months ago holding a pregnancy test that was not hers and signed divorce papers that were not filed and walked out of a life that was not working.

That woman had survived.

Now she had to walk into a room and sit across from the man who had made surviving necessary.

And she was going to do it in the best outfit she owned.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​